DPI Scaling Support

The following table shows the maximum DPI Scaling supported, based on the vertical resolution of the monitor being used.

Monitor Vertical Resolution (pixels)

Maximum DPI Scaling Supported

1024 to 1200

100%

1600

125%

1800

200%

2K and above

250%

Other Considerations

The Size of the Design

The system requirements detailed above are for a medium-sized PCB design, for example up to 1000 components and up to 1000 nets. If your designs have a larger number of components and/or nets, then consider upgrading the processor family (for example, upgrade an i5 to an i7).

The Importance of a Good Graphics Card

Graphics cards are a critical hardware element that can have a large impact on both the performance and stability of systems. Choose the right hardware requirements necessary to achieve stunning results, make the whole system more responsive and ‘feel’ better, and remove distractions to design caused by lags in the GUI. Altium PCB editor has been optimized for use with DirectX 9.0c, and requires a graphics card that supports this. Altium has chosen DirectX rather than OpenGL for its graphics engine, which has become the preferred standard for gaming graphics cards. An advantage of this choice is the fact that gaming cards are often significantly cheaper than workstation cards of equivalent performance. We therefore strongly recommend the use of a gaming card instead of a workstation card.

The need for a high-performance graphics card is directly related to the amount of use of the 3D PCB capabilities. For example, a Core i7 processor with on-chip integrated HD4000 graphics will be more than adequate if you only require occasional use of the 3D PCB capabilities. If you intend to make extensive use of the 3D PCB features, for computationally intensive tasks such as 3D video or interactive presentations, then it is recommended to use a dedicated gaming graphics card in combination with a 3D mouse, such as the Space Navigator.

Altium Vault

Below are the recommended and minimum system requirements to install and run an Altium Vault. Note that these recommendations are for 10 to 30 concurrent users.

The Part Catalog service in the Altium Vault (3.0 and later) provides a re-engineered system for making real-world part choices, enabling supply chain information to be stored and retrieved in a more efficient way. Be aware that this does result in an incompatibility in the way Part Choices are handled between Altium Designer and the Altium Vault. Altium Designer (17.0 and later) supports bidirectional PCL (Part Choice List) data retrieval with Altium Vault (3.0 or later). However, previous versions of Altium Designer can only retrieve such data from previous versions of the Altium Vault, and vice-versa.